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Curzon
Author

Curzon

Date

April 5th, 2005

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The Soft Bigotry of British Racial Humour

I was in the UK for the weekend and snapped this picture while in country: the pub “Labour In Vain” in the town of Barnam in West Sussex, Great Britain.

The sun glare is a little bright, so allow me to describe the placard to those of you who can’t make it out. What you can see here is a buxom lady scrubbing a little black boy in a tub, hence the tongue-in-cheek “Labour In Vain.”Â? (Note the British spelling.)

Patriarchal? Politically incorrect? Racist? All I know is that stuff like that hasn’t been in the US in a good 35 years”¦

Comments to this entry

Joe
April 5, 2005
4:09 am
Check out "this BCal ad from 1983":http://www.tv-ark.org.uk/commercials/commercials_a-f/british_caledonian.rm (RealPlayer required). Fun stuff.
praktike
April 5, 2005
4:45 am
I saw a real blackface Aunt Jemima pancake restaurant sign when I was in Taipai that was like that.
Dan
April 5, 2005
1:42 pm
Remember that the joke is on the white woman in the picture. So maybe it's both sexist and racist. :)
Curzon
April 5, 2005
3:03 pm
That was what Dr. A. R. Wallace had to say: the joke's on her!

And as for Taipei, I've seen similar stuff like this in Japan... but not in such a public place in the West.
Brice Timmons
April 9, 2005
4:53 pm
Is this necessarily racist or bigoted? If the implication was that blacks are dirty, then yes, but one could read a deeper impliation that we, the white West, try in vain to make everything like ourselves, that to do so seems to us a normal task but is really quite absurd from the perspective of a third party observer.
Alan Mobbs
April 23, 2006
8:37 pm
Without knowing the story this may seem racist. A maried woman went to Africa (I think in the 1880's) and came back pregnant. When the baby was born it was black, and she tired to scrub him thinking it would make him white, or else she had a lot of explaining to do to her husband. I do not see this as racist,it is not doing another race down as such but it shows just how ignorant people were in those days. There have been campaigns to get pubs with this name to change to something more PC, but perhaps it is better to have a public reminder of how we have moved forward. My brothers mother in law had a small china ornament bearing the legend 'How ink is made' and showed a young black child melting into the bathwater. This is just plain racist and offensive and no longer made. Maybe we need reminders like the pub sign from time to time to show how far we have moved forward.